Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Because of the importance of the issue, I rise again. There has been some querying of how we could monitor it and the paucity of detail. I will deal with that first. On my advice, the department receives around 6,000 calls a year which are either complaints or offering information of some kind. I would suggest that from that you could get a pretty broad picture of what is going on. However, we fully recognise that that by itself in the past has not been sufficient; that is why we have this bill here for mandatory reporting of serious incidents. But people do complain. They do phone up the department. We have the new office of aged care accreditation with new staff, and they will be carrying out that scrutiny. So I do think it is something that is capable of being monitored. On that basis, I again make the point that the government will be ensuring that it is monitored, and the government still does not see its way clear to supporting these two amendments.

Question negatived.

Bill, as amended, agreed to.

Bill reported with an amendment; report adopted.